Many of the toughest sentencing laws responsible for the explosion of the U.S. prison population were drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which helps corporations write model legislation. Now a new exposé reveals ALEC has paved the way for states and corporations to replace unionized workers with prison labor. We speak with Mike Elk, contributing labor reporter at The Nation magazine. He says ALEC and private prison companies “put a mass amount of people in jail, and then they created a situation where they could exploit that.” Elk notes that in 2005 more than 14 million pounds of beef infected with rat feces processed by inmates were not recalled, in order to avoid drawing attention to how many products are made by prison labor.
New Exposé Tracks ALEC-Private Prison Industry Effort to Replace Unionized Workers with Prison Labor - Democracy Now!
via democracynow.org
FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Cap-and-Trade is Dead; Long Live Cap-and-Trade
But the main reason is simply this: at some point, the country is going to have to raise revenues to fix the deficit. And cap-and-trade, if done the right way — if permits are sold, rather than given away to the industry — can produce quite a lot of revenues: $145 billion per year initially, the CBO estimated in 2008, with the number rising much faster than inflation as emissions targets become continually more stringent.
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